duz posted:

The brief history of SALR

Back in the old days, the forums didn't track what threads you read so biznatchio write a Firefox extension to do it for you. In time, biznatchio no longer had enough free time to keep the extension up to date with the forum changes so others took over. After some time, the extension was updated to use the Firefox 2.0 SQL engine for even better stability and thread tracking. Recently the forums have added read thread tracking rending much of what this extension does obsolete.

So what the heck does SALR do now?

Lots of stuff with lots of options. Here's a short, incomplete list of features:

Are there any plans to add an "open all threads with new posts in tabs" functionality? It'd be nice to be able to dump an extension.

That's definitely been a somewhat popular feature request (popular enough to have spawned that greasemonkey script many years ago). The historical answer has been 'no' to that request as-is, though. I could envision a more interesting version, maybe, where you could set up things like threads you always/never want the button to affect, max amount of tabs opened, min/max posts required to open, etc., but that will take some more consideration, probably require some discussion, and of course take some time.

I've filed an issue for it so the ideas won't be forgotten, but right now there are some much higher priority issues to work on - finishing optimizing the multi-process stuff, migrating SALR's database backend away from main-thread synchronous SQL (should be a nice speed up for Firefox and SALR start times), and I'm also looking into whether we can offer an option to support Firefox Sync for SALR's database (user notes/colors, hidden avatars, ignored threads, starred threads, etc).

edit: Firefox Sync support is feasible and will probably show up some time after our database backend changes are done.

Thanks. I totally understand that the multi-process stuff and everything that might be related is a higher priority. What language are Firefox extensions written in? If it's still on the to-do by the time I graduate in May, I might give a crack at adding that myself.

Thanks. I totally understand that the multi-process stuff and everything that might be related is a higher priority. What language are Firefox extensions written in? If it's still on the to-do by the time I graduate in May, I might give a crack at adding that myself.

Mostly Javascript. Contributions are welcome - I still need to write up something about how to get all set up with Node.js and Grunt Gulp to be able to build the extension, but for now I'll handle explaining that (and anything else about working on SALR) on a case by case basis.

For anyone else who couldn't install from that link, you need to go through here: https://github.com/astral-sa/salr/releases
Firefox blocks the link for me without giving me the option to allow it if I go directly to the XPI.

For anyone else who couldn't install from that link, you need to go through here: https://github.com/astral-sa/salr/releases
Firefox blocks the link for me without giving me the option to allow it if I go directly to the XPI.

Interesting; I wonder what's blocking it. Maybe it's a 'have you visited that site before?' check - after having visited a page on github, does it then let you install from the XPI link in the thread?

edit: I just tested with a completely fresh Firefox profile and I still had the option to install, so I guess that's not it.

I did notice one thing, though - if I middle-click the xpi link, the tab opens in the background and it doesn't give me an option to allow the addon install. However, if I left-click the xpi link, the tab opens in the foreground and it does offer the allow button. Might this be what you're running into?

Tab Mix Plus opens the tab in the background for me when left clicking and the link still works properly for me, though I have to go to the tab manually for it to actually pop up the warning that something is trying to install and start downloading.

3.0.2 just started throwing an error in the quick post window, with 45.0b1. It just says it got a response that it didn't expect, and to close the window and try again.

I'm going to try the test version and see what happens.

Edit: Firefox is crashing to desktop on startup now, so this may just be a symptom of something else being lovely. Fun!

Edit2: No idea what happened before, but FF is running again. The unexpected response error is still occurring under 3.1.0-beta-8.

Looking into this - likeliest cause is a third-party cookie policy issue, in which case as a workaround you can either:

Add a cookie exception to always allow cookies from the SA forums, or

temporarily enable third party cookies from visited sites

and that should fix things for you.

A little info about that error: when you click a quick button, SALR makes a request for the full reply page to import any quoted text and also grab some information off the page so we can pass SA's forged-post and anti-double-posts check.

Getting that error means you're receiving a response from SA, but the message box is missing. In the past (Firefox ~3.0 era) this happened if someone had third-party cookies disabled, which made SALR's request not pass along the relevant cookies. We fixed that by setting a specific load flag with our request, but it looks like Firefox may not be respecting that.

Is there any way to make a "live thread" reload button at the bottom to reload page then go to the last unread post?

Ie. for GDT threads in Sports forums, its kinda annoying going back forum then latest post. or just hitting F5 and trying to find out wtf you left off on... (especially when there's there like 5 pages in 1 second in some major play). I remember I had it before, I think I it was in the opera version

Is there any way to make a "live thread" reload button at the bottom to reload page then go to the last unread post?

Ie. for GDT threads in Sports forums, its kinda annoying going back forum then latest post. or just hitting F5 and trying to find out wtf you left off on... (especially when there's there like 5 pages in 1 second in some major play). I remember I had it before, I think I it was in the opera version

If you enable the page navigator (SALR options -> Threads), the rightmost button acts the same as the 'jump to last read post' button from forums/bookmarks:

Can we have a feature that stops them from playing until they're clicked? Some of them have been destroying my browser.

As far as I understand, after the forums are in the cloud, ZDR's going to work on proper BBCode support and/or forum options to handle the embeds better. Once that happens, SALR can properly interact with them and offer further customization options.

If I have a chunk of spare time and a good forum solution hasn't happened yet, I can look into whipping something up that watches for when the forums JS embeds the videos (using a MutationObserver, for the technically inclined) and either prevents the conversion to video or changes the videos' properties/attributes. This falls into the hacky solution category though.

Got it. Didn't realize it was JS doing the actual embedding. No wonder videos and tweets make the page jump after everything loads. Thanks for checking!

I read up on MutationObservers and this turned out to be a lot easier than I thought so here's a dev build you can test. After you install it, you'll need to go to about :config and toggle preference extensions.salastread.dontAutoplayGifVideos to true to enable the feature.

It'll auto-update to the next release version (4.1.0) when it comes out for real.

Forum JS only sets the autoplay flag on mp4 and webm videos when they're gifv stuff from imgur or gfy stuff from gfycat; this option prevents those from automatically playing (and adds controls so you can click the videos to start playing them). It doesn't affect anything else, nor does it (at least in its current state) do anything to prevent the conversion from links to embedded video elements.

I ALSO HAVE A CLOUD OF DEDICATED IDIOTS FOLLOWING ME SHITTING UP EVERY THREAD I POST IN

IGNORE ME AND ANY DINOSAUR THAT FIGHTS WITH ME BECAUSE WE JUST CAN'T SHUT UP

I'm having problems with "thread id not found in live forums" when posting to threads randomly, as well as 0 result searches, which can get fixed by refreshing, and bookmarking threads getting hung up on the little "loading" gif that appears when you click it.

Zen Robot Man's having none of this, saying it's on my end, the only thing I can think of is SALR. I can't really test it too much on a blank firefox profile because the bugs are intermittent, random, and sorta-rare enough to not really justify using a new profile for a while just for SA.

I'm having problems with "thread id not found in live forums" when posting to threads randomly, as well as 0 result searches, which can get fixed by refreshing, and bookmarking threads getting hung up on the little "loading" gif that appears when you click it.

Zen Robot Man's having none of this, saying it's on my end, the only thing I can think of is SALR. I can't really test it too much on a blank firefox profile because the bugs are intermittent, random, and sorta-rare enough to not really justify using a new profile for a while just for SA.

Is anyone else on SALR having the same or similar problems as me?

Zero result searches are a forum bug - I've seen it happen before when I clicked someone's "post history" link, and SALR certainly isn't interfering with fetching the results of those.

I haven't personally run into the thread ID/live forums thing, but I have seen one or two other posters mention it. The first said they were using an iPhone though, so I'm going to say that's also probably not SALR's doing but a weird intermittent forum bug.

SALR doesn't touch the bookmark stars at all. Although we do add one to the page navigator, the code that powers the bookmark stars is all handled by forum JS; any issues with it are likely going to be a network or server issue.

Zero result searches are a forum bug - I've seen it happen before when I clicked someone's "post history" link, and SALR certainly isn't interfering with fetching the results of those.

I haven't personally run into the thread ID/live forums thing, but I have seen one or two other posters mention it. The first said they were using an iPhone though, so I'm going to say that's also probably not SALR's doing but a weird intermittent forum bug.

SALR doesn't touch the bookmark stars at all. Although we do add one to the page navigator, the code that powers the bookmark stars is all handled by forum JS; any issues with it are likely going to be a network or server issue.

Edit: Clarified bookmarks a bit more.

Cheers, I figured as much, but it's nice to have a bit of clarification. The bookmark thing may have just been a weird Firefox bug or something, who knows.

imgur API v2 was finally disabled, which means uploading images from the quick quote window, the workaround for the forum image link bug, and the experimental gif-to-video feature are temporarily broken

edit: I'll put out a new beta/dev version tonight to fix this, then hopefully a full release this weekend.

Is there any way to change the size of the quick reply window to be friendlier to smaller desktops? On a 1280x720 display the title bar disappears above the top of the desktop. You'd think this wouldn't come up these days but for good or ill Firefox is almost a model HiDPI app and on Windows this is how ill appears.